Wavestar Internships · Summer + year-round
Ship real work with the people who own it.
We run a small, high-touch internship program. No rotations through five teams. No demo project that gets thrown away. You join one team, pair with one senior operator, and ship to main by week three. Recent graduates and current students welcome.
- Cohort size
- 4 – 8 per term
- Summer term
- May 19 – August 15
- Year-round
- 4 – 8 months · rolling
- Stipend
- $10,400 / month · US
Tracks
Four streams · one team each
Every intern is attached to a shipping function, not to a mentorship program. The work is real.
- 01
Engineering intern
Ship production code on TypeScript, Rust, Go, or Python. Paired with a senior engineer, not a manager. Three sample first sprints: extend a Terminal dashboard; add an attestation verifier to the SDK; write a load generator for the ORCH ledger. - 02
Policy and regulatory intern
Research rule-makings, draft comment letters, and maintain the filings tracker. Works under the General Counsel. Recent law students, MPA candidates, and political science seniors with an interest in financial infrastructure. - 03
Clearing operations intern
Shadow the clearing-ops team through a design-partner onboarding cycle. Reconcile margin positions, draft member onboarding materials, and produce the weekly operations scorecard. Finance or economics background helpful. - 04
Research intern
Writes a Wavestar whitepaper on a defined topic over the course of the internship. Candidates with strong writing samples and a background in market microstructure, distributed systems, or space policy.
Logistics
Compensation, dates, and eligibility
- Stipend · US
- $10,400 per month
- Stipend · International
- Cost-of-living adjusted
- Housing
- $2,500 per month stipend · hub cities
- Relocation
- One round-trip flight for in-person weeks
- Remote
- Yes, by default
At least one in-person week at a hub is required.
- Summer term
- May 19 – August 15, 2026
Applications open January 5 and close March 1.
- Year-round
- Rolling, 4 – 8 months
Applications reviewed within 21 days of submission.
- Eligibility
- Current students and recent grads · ≤12 months out
We sponsor work authorisation in the US and UK for exceptional candidates.
- Return offer rate · Target
- 75%
We hire interns we would hire as full-time operators; anything else is a waste of everyone's time.
How we pick
What we look for
- 01
Craft-first judgment
A portfolio that shows deep curiosity about one thing. Strong writing samples. Code you have shipped. A paper you enjoyed. Depth beats breadth. - 02
Comfort with ambiguity
You will be asked to define your own work within a sprint. We do not spoon-feed tickets. If you have never worked without instructions, this will be uncomfortable. - 03
Writing ability
We are a writing-heavy culture. A 400-word explanation of a technical problem is a plausible interview exercise. This applies to engineering tracks too. - 04
A reason to be here
You do not need space-industry background. You do need a clear reason Wavestar interests you — not a generic one. We invest in interns who chose us, specifically.
Applying
Email with a CV and a 200-word note.
Tell us which track, when you are available, and one specific thing about Wavestar you want to learn while you are here. We respond to every application inside 21 days.